An appeaser is one who feeds a BHEAST, hoping it will eat him last.

Was The George Orwell Blog Prize 2012 Rigged in favour of Rangers Tax Case?

Every year, the Orwell prize is awarded for the journalism, book and blog which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition

“to make political writing into an art”.

I ask the aforementioned question in the title in interest of “sporting” fairness to the long list of people nominated for the long list but especially the few from that list who were short listed for the title.

Greenslade is Professor of Journalism at London’s City University and has been a media commentator since 1992, most notably for The Guardian.

He has been a journalist for 41 years and has worked for most of Britain’s national newspapers. He was editor of the Daily Mirror (1990-91), was managing editor (news) at the Sunday Times (1987-90) and assistant editor of The Sun (1981-86).

He is on the board of the academic quarterly, the British Journalism Review, and is a trustee of the media ethics charity, MediaWise. He is married to Noreen Taylor, the former Daily Mirror journalist.

Greenslade makes no attempt to hide his Cheerleading for the now defunct and discredited Rangers Tax Case Blog?

Let’s look at the facts and we can judge for ourselves.

Director of The George Orwell Blog prize

Jean Seaton commonly writes for the Guardian in fact here is a link to were she waxes lyrically about the Rangers Tax case Blog in said publication.

A journalist for many years, no doubt her paths would’ve crossed in that time with Roy Greenslade probably as her boss as sub editor or editor of a national newspaper. She is also a columnist for The Guardian.

Hopi Sen

Guardian columnist and left-leaning blogger

Sean Dodson

A Guardian contributor and senior lecturer of journalism at Leeds Metropolitan University Sean Dodson was also a Visiting lecturer at Roy Greenslade’s department at London City University from October 2005 to May 2009 a total of 3 years 8 months.

The judges were alleged to have said:

“The 2012 Blog Prize showed that not only could blogs comment on current events, they could drive stories forward. Rangers Tax Case takes what might be a dry topic – the tax affairs of a sports team – and shows how a striving for transitory success has severely distorted sporting, legal and ethical boundaries.

“Displaying focused contempt for those who evade difficult truths, and beating almost every Scottish football journalist to the real story – Rangers Tax Case shows how expertise and incisive writing can expose the hypocrisies the powerful use to protect themselves from the consequences of their actions.”

All three judges are employed by the Guardian.

Did the Guardian influence them to pick the Rangers Tax case Blog as an attempt to bring in and boost online visitors just like Channel 4 Alex Thompson did for his dreary little blog and in doing soon boosted the amounts of comments for his individual posts by over 3000% in some cases.

As the now discredited Rangers Tax case Blogger said himself.

“This monster has grown to the point where it is now fielding daily traffic of over 100,000 views, while new arguments and ideas are fuelled by reader comments that are now coming in at a rate of about 1,500 per day. These are odd statistics for discussions characterised by accounting conventions and insolvency law. It is as if all of the cool kids in the playground suddenly want to read the swots’ algebra homework.”

Did the Guardian get to their judges to tap into this online traffic and therefore “financially dope” their website?

The Guardian the newspaper that dedicated a whole page to Rangers Tax Case sectarian diatribe were among other thing he blamed it all on the big bad protestants keeping the “18% of Roman Catholics” down.

All three judges would have been under Rangers Tax case blogger Champion Greenslade.

Greenslades bio points out that from 1992 until 2005 he was media commentator for The Guardian. He then spent six months with The Daily Telegraph in a similar capacity before returning to The Guardian to launch a media blog.

Greenslade Professor of Journalism at City University London is still a powerful and influential man in the media for any up and coming blogger or columnist.

If all that I suggest is proved true then I think George Orwell better change one of his famous prose too.